The Benton Courier: "Catherine Ryan Hyde wrote a novel called “Pay It Forward,” which was published in 1999. Its philosophy was given more publicity when a film of the same name, starring Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment, came out in 2000.
Nancy and I watched the movie last week. I had seen it before; she had not. It was decent, moving and - if you let it- caused you to think.
Invoking serious thought is probably a goal more movies should have, but that's a different column for a different day.
The book presents aspects to the story that the movie people didn't choose to include, one being a biracial relationship. But that could have been because the actor serving as an executive producer was Spacey, who is white. He likely became involved initially because he saw it as a vehicle for his acting career. Thus the male lead in the movie was white, rather than black. His character's facial deformities were caused by burns of child abuse, not from burns suffered while fighting in the Vietnam War, as was the case in the book."
